The Blasters

You've never truly heard "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" until you've listened to it just past 1:00 a.m. on a sweat-soaked summer night, cranked through the cracked speaker of a boom box perched atop a scaffold set on the gravel ballast behind the crash wall curving along the train tracks at the north end of ground zero — seventeen minutes of heavy metal, two ladders, a cart holding twenty-foot lengths of two-inch glossy black conduit, four electricians, one foreman, two safety inspectors, a construction super, plus the PATH railroad Employee in Charge, Alex, a paunchy Russian subcontracted by the owner of this land and this commuter line, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, to keep an eye on the proceedings.

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"Ziss iz orf," Alex says, pointing down to the nearest third rail. "Ziss iz only vun — you see deh light? — ziss iz ohn. Becohs zey verking nighttime, but some of zhem used for deh pletform. Ziss iz used for pletform. Pipple steel come..."

The rest of Alex's safety advisory — you don't want to mess with 650 volts of direct current — is drowned out by Iron Butterfly and an electrician drilling quarter-inch holes through the concrete slab above to hang trapezes for the piping. The air is dead and damp and fouled with dust, and the shift — 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., while the northern PATH tube is closed before the morning rush hour starts and tens of thousands of pipple come — has just begun.

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Seventy feet below street level, under bare bulbs, these guys are relocating the utilities — rerouting track switches, forced-air lines, fire standpipes, fiber-optic cable — that run the railroad, making way to plant the steel columns of a building that someday will rise 1,776 feet straight up from this pit. Amid the shadows of this tunnel — and the shade of the World Trade Center, the city-within-a-city that once stood a few yards beyond the far side of the crash wall — these guys are putting up the Freedom Tower.

"After all the pipe's in and it's all secured," says Brian, the construction super, "then they pull new cable through. Put the new cable in, splice it together, get everything up and running again, and then ya take out all the other stuff."

No shit. It took five years, give or take, to build the Twin Towers, and that was back when the Port Authority could seize the land, horse-trade with the political hacks on both sides of the Hudson River, and run the whole show itself. Five years it took to create the World Trade Center, and down it all came in a day, and now, five years of sobbing, stalling, and snarling politics later, the world is still waiting to see what comes next.

What comes next is another twenty-foot length of conduit. Once hung and strapped, its tapered sleeve is slammed into the mouth of the one behind it with a two-by-four and a lump hammer, then sealed at the joint by a two-part epoxy. "It welds the pipes together once it dries," Ken says. "They're strapped every five feet. It becomes a real rigid structure."

For three months the electricians have toiled behind the crash wall — these short nights during the week, with rotating crews pulling Friday-night-to-Monday-morning "super" weekends — and they have three months to go until they're done. Three months of dank air, stepping light over the third rail, drilling and banging, and tinny classic rock all night long: no problemo.

"The good outweighs the bad," Ken says. "Money, blastin' in and out of the city quick — no traffic, ya know?"

The commute is quick; the work is slow. Not just drilling holes through twelve-thousand-psi concrete and notching beams and splicing lines and hanging banks of conduit — they've got the bureaucracy to drill through, too. The electrical subcontractor and the construction firm have to get week-by-week sign-offs from the Port Authority and its railroad division for every stitch of work.

"You're allowed to go so far with the pipe," says Brian. "You can move a signal line. You can dig a trench. Every time you wanna go fast, you gotta slow down because you gotta get something approved."

"In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" finally ends; not so the dance of regulations and red tape. "We all got safety managers," Brian says. "The Port Authority comes down here sometimes with two of their safety guys. That's four safety guys." He shrugs. "Whatever it is, it is. Go with the flow, roll with the punches — that's what I do. Chip away, chip away, chip away, and it all comes through."

Fifty yards uptrack from the banging and drilling, across from a column bearing the legend RED SOX SUCK scrawled eye high in white chalk, a new steel door cut through the crash wall — the PA took several weeks to authorize the door — opens on a short zigzag of metal stairs leading down to the dirt floor of the pit.

"It's different at night," Brian says. "It's very spiritual down here."

He's the son of a carpenter, ex-Coast Guard, a clean-shaven, blue-eyed, straight-ahead guy, forty-five years old. The pit is where Brian took his fiancee to Windows on the World, the swankiest restaurant in Manhattan, to pop the question. Where his youngest brother, Michael, a firefighter, died on 9/11. Where he himself came down that very night to work on a rescue without survivors, and where he found his brother's gear on St. Patrick's Day 2002, unearthed from the rubble, and where he worked until the pit was clean and the PATH trains were up and running again in late 2003. The pit is where he's helping build the Freedom Tower, however long that takes.

It's plenty spiritual. There's the spire of St. Paul's rising into the night haze, just past the far wall of the pit, and the jutting, shrouded hulk of what was the Deutsche Bank office tower across Liberty Street, bashed to ruin by the toppling south twin, where work crews are still waiting to get back to the task of taking it down while the bureaucrats puzzle out the protocol for separating toxic dust from bone fragments and other human remains. There's the square footprints of the Twin Towers, formed by the sheared-off tops of their perimeter columns, boxed in plywood now, waiting to be enshrined by a memorial. And here, a few feet away, under a cracked and chipping blue wooden cover, sits the useless Freedom Tower cornerstone, absurdly dedicated on July 4, 2004, before Governor George Pataki and the Port Authority realized that the one sign-off the PA itself somehow neglected to get was approval from the New York Police Department for the Freedom Tower, which in the NYPD's opinion needed to be moved and completely redesigned for security reasons — which cost, in addition to tens of millions of dollars, yet another year.

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Which is why the most spiritual — and, quite frankly, thrilling — aspect of the pit is the hoe ram, an elephantine Caterpillar 350, a fifty-ton excavator fitted with a huge hydraulic hammer, asleep next to a hill of rock and dirt. The hoe ram works days outside the crash wall — no tunnel, no tracks, no crapped-out boom box — banging through old slab on grade, breaking rocks, readying the pit to receive the massive footings that will brace the inner core of the Freedom Tower.

"This is where they started the five-foot cut down to bedrock," Brian says. "I love diggin' out here. It's like you're a kid. You're choppin', you're diggin', you're loadin' trucks up — it's just fuckin' great. It really is fun. It's good to have a job that you really fuckin' like and love. It's really good."

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You can hear it in his voice, see it in his eyes, feel it in the spread of his arms beneath the night sky — It's really good — and you remember him a year ago, just as everything stopped while the work crews waited on the cops and the Port Authority and the architects and the governor to hash out and sign off on a redesign, explaining why he had to get down to the pit and get back to work on the Freedom Tower.

"I felt a compassion to go back," he had said, "and work rebuilding the biggest building in the world as another stickler to give those terrorists — in your face, we're gonna build the biggest building again, right here on the same site. I felt passionate that I would wanna be a part of that."

See, that's the thing: This isn't Pearl Harbor. Or Oklahoma City or New Orleans, either. This is New York City here, lower Manhattan, a couple blocks from Wall Street. Sixteen billion dollars, give or take, is being spent here — on these sixteen flattened acres — and though getting them vertical and flush again won't bring back one murdered soul, waiting for the hacks and bureaucrats to stamp the forms and divvy up the money and the spoils of tragic glory is a dishonor and a personal disgrace to the men whose battle it is to rebuild. Not for nothing, but to guys like Brian, Osama bin Laden is just a pissant, a drama queen — the robes, the rifle, the stateless head-of-state charade — and it's gonna be 9/11 forever, or at least until their job is done.

Back inside the crash wall, Alex has his flashlight trained up at the slab, inspecting tonight's work while the crew taunts him and Hendrix sings "All Along the Watchtower" through the cracked speaker.

"Alex seen a loose nut up there."

"Is this your first job, Alex?"

"Employee in Charge — in charge of what, I still don't know."

"We're all tryin' to figure that out."

"Awright, let's go," says Brian. "Let's wrap it up."

"We're gonna kill ya. There's no downside for us. We're just gonna pound the shit out of you. I hope you're ready."

This — the unpretty message delivered to Silverstein Properties by a City Hall hatchet man — is how buildings don't get built. This is how the pit has stayed a pit for five long years. This is how, and power is why.

The hatchet man works for Dan Doctoroff, the city's deputy mayor in charge of economic development and, um, rebuilding. Dan has a degree in government from Harvard, a law degree from the University of Chicago, and a vision for New York City's future — a big vision, much bigger and far more complex than just a sixteen-acre pit. Everyone you talk to agrees on two things about Dan: that Dan's a brilliant visionary, and that Dan never lets you forget for a moment that he's a brilliant visionary.

Rebuilding the pit hadn't been on Dan's mind much since 9/11. It was the Port Authority's pit, and since the PA answers to the governors of New York and New Jersey, not the city, George Pataki was on the case down in the pit. Plus, Dan had a bigger fish to fry: a vision of titanic development on Manhattan's far West Side, in midtown, where new office space is all but impossible to build or find. His vision included twenty million square feet of new office space, a new stadium for the New York Jets to come home to from New Jersey, and — dearest by far to Dan's heart — the 2012 Olympics.

As for the object of Dan's man's threat — hell, rebuilding that pit is all Larry Silverstein has thought about since 9/12. And while Larry doesn't boast Dan's academic credentials, he is an old-school New York City real estate developer, with the hide of a rhino, the guts of a grizzly, a bite like a shark's, and the brain of...well, of a New York City real estate developer with fifty years' practice in the not-so-fine art of urban warfare. Everyone you talk to agrees on only one thing about Larry: He won't back down.

Oh, Larry had one other thing, too — a ninety-nine-year leasehold on the World Trade Center, signed with the Port Authority, dated July 24, 2001, fifty days before the barbarians reduced it to ground zero. And so he had the legal right to rebuild, to recapture every last square foot of lost office space on the WTC site — and that, on September 12, 2001, is exactly what Larry set out to do.

For five years, Larry has clashed with the PA over who'll build and pay for what at ground zero. Five years butting heads with Pataki over the Freedom Tower, paying $10 million per month in rent to the PA for the mud at the bottom of the empty pit, suing and getting sued by the WTC insurance companies — five years standing fast upon the bedrock of his lease and not giving an inch.

Larry and Dan had faced off once before, late in 2004, when the city had signed off on Larry's plans to rebuild the WTC. One night during the course of those negotiations, Dan, who wanted new housing built at ground zero, walked out. Fed up with an old hondler who wouldn't give, he said, "I'm sick of this shit," and stormed out of the room. And Larry got up to follow him. "I'll walk with you, Dan," said Larry, and walked him to the elevator. And, very politely, Larry said to him, "If you want to talk more about this, please get in touch with me."

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That's old school, brother — and eventually Dan signed off on Larry's rebuilding plan. But that was then and this is now, and in the year and a half between then and now, Dan's West Side dream died, and one of the men who killed it was Larry's political rabbi, Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York state assembly and assemblyman from lower Manhattan, which includes the pit. Worse, Silverstein Properties wasn't among the many developers who supported Dan's Olympian dream with gelt. And Larry is as focused as ever on building office space at ground zero, but Dan's big vision still calls for building new housing. And no matter how many times Dan explains his big vision, Larry isn't backing down.

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So Dan's hatchet man issues his threat, and it comes to pass that Dan runs a brand-new economic analysis of Larry's rebuilding plan and lets the media know that Larry's plan is rubbish. Worse than rubbish — it might be a plot. Dan testifies to the city council at a special hearing that not only would Larry default on his ground-zero obligations after building a single office tower — two at most, says Dan — but he might very well scurry off with half a billion dollars in pure profit, "a disaster for the city, state, and Port Authority," says Dan, "and a blemish on the memory of those who lost their lives on 9/11."

When Dan invokes the murdered innocents, you figure that Larry must be hunkered down again at the bargaining table, stiff-necking Dan's vision until Dan's big brain and ass are on fire, but it's truly clear what's what only when Dan shares his new vision with the city council: Larry should hand over to the Port Authority the two choicest building parcels on ground zero in exchange for a reduction in his rent. Dan tells the council that the PA — which hasn't put up a skyscraper since the Twin Towers forty years ago and has already publicly announced that it won't ask its employees to work in the Freedom Tower — will build its own new headquarters on one of those choice parcels and flip the second one to another developer, presumably one who shares Dan's condominium vision.

Nobody on the council questions Dan's economic analysis — heck, no one outside of Dan's office has ever perused it — but one councilman does wonder out loud why all of a sudden Larry not only isn't fit to rebuild the WTC but is being portrayed as both a blemish and a potential looter.

"This is not personal at all," Dan says. But the venom in his voice — "Larry doesn't have one dime in this project," he sneers at one point — tells you that for Dan this has become very, very personal.

After Dan finishes pounding the shit out of Larry, up step the New York Times (Greed Vs. Good at Ground Zero) and the Daily News (Get Lost, Larry). Then, finally, it is Pataki's turn. After declaring that the negotiations are dead, he tells the world that Larry "has betrayed the public's trust and that of all New Yorkers. We cannot and will not allow profit margins and financial interests to be put ahead of public interest in expediting the rebuilding of the site of the greatest tragedy on American soil."

And when you hear that — the head of the state washing himself clean with the blood of the lambs of 9/11 and fingering the real estate developer as the source of all evil — that's when you know that Larry Silverstein has won.

Day by day, the skin of the pit gets deeper, louder, harder, more crowded. The five-foot slice through the old slab on grade goes down closer to ten feet now, down to better bedrock. The Freedom Tower's twenty-two-thousand-square-foot core will sit here, its thick inner walls and columns anchored to concrete-and-steel footings sunk twelve and fifteen feet deep, into rock hard enough to hold and spread a load of 120 tons per square foot.

Three line drills swarm the surface, insects next to even the smaller, bucket-nosed excavator, screaming as their business ends spiral down into the rock, coring two-and-a-half-inch holes, tracing the rectangle of the footings-to-be, flagged in bright orange, so that the hoe ram's hydraulic hammer can punch down and pulverize more easily. And that noise — steel stuttering incessantly, relentlessly banging, breaking rock into rock, breaking that down to smaller rock — is one long, staccato cataclysm, obliterating from onset to end every other noise down here. The operating engineer sitting up in the hoe ram's cab hauls down six figures a year plus benefits and earns every bloody-eared cent.

The ground trembles ten yards off when the hoe ram shimmies past on its treads, hammer raised, making way for the bucket to grade a hillock of dirt and rock, moving mounds of debris to be loaded onto the trucks that come late in the day to take it across the Hudson to a yard in New Jersey. The grader's keeping the floor of the pit level and smooth enough for the smaller machines to move and work without tipping into a void or seam in the hoe ram's stony wake. Four thick-gloved laborers scramble, climbing the pile to yank out the old rebar, tossing it onto a pile of its own, where they cut it with welding torches while a fifth man hoses down the dust.

The guy whose construction company was the general contractor on the Empire State Building once said that building skyscrapers was the nearest peacetime equivalent to war. This part of it — foundation work — is like infantry storming the beach.

"The beginning of our job is to get down to good solid rock that will support the immense structure that's going on top of it," Angelo says. "If we fail, the building fails. It's that simple."

Angelo has been building foundations and superstructures in New York City for fifty years, so when he pauses and adds, "We will not fail. We have not ever failed. We take every precaution and make every effort to do it right — exactly right. That's what we do," you tend to believe him. Angelo is a serious guy, still a bear of a man at the age of seventy-two. He's a vice-president now, or chief operating officer — the foundation contractor isn't big on titles — but like a lot of the men in the business of building buildings, from developers on down, he walks the job on a regular basis — for now, every day.

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It's a dicey time for Angelo and the Freedom Tower foundations crew: They're blasting at the pit, using explosives to get down the next six or seven feet to 120-ton bedrock. This is standard practice everywhere in the country, including New York City, but not here: not at ground zero, where facts and logic don't apply, not without a tussle; where mourning and ferocious rage, stoked and milked by politicos and the media, still fuel a slew of victims' groups for whom this work site is also a sacred burial ground; where the community board weighs in on every issue, whether anyone's listening or, more often, not; where the NYPD and the New York City Fire Department don't often agree on who has jurisdiction over which activity on these sixteen acres; and where, truth is, absolutely no one makes the rules except the Port Authority, which said, "No blasting," before work had even begun.

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"We're not cellar diggers," Angelo says. "We're contractors. We're engineers. We have blasted in the severest of conditions. We're not accustomed to standing back and waiting for people who really don't know what to do, who don't understand what's happening, to make decisions.

"One of the questions asked was 'What is the effect on the slurry wall?' " Angelo's talking about the two-foot-thick, seventy-foot-tall steel-and-concrete wall built four decades ago to keep the original WTC foundations from being flooded by the Hudson River, a few hundred feet to the west. "My God, the slurry wall withstood earthquake proportions when 9/11 happened. The guy asking the question simply doesn't understand."

So to reassure the PA, they've rigged sensors everywhere — on the slurry wall, on the railroad tracks, on the surrounding buildings — to measure the vibrations, and they've posted surveying crews to make sure that nothing moves, and the FDNY has a fire marshal supervising, and the NYPD's Bomb Disposal Unit is standing by up on the street, and they've brought in a consultant all the way from Cleveland, a heavy hitter known as Dr. Dynamite.

"I have an explosive personality at times," says Dr. Dynamite, whose real name is Ed Walter. Ed's dad, Dr. Edward J. Walter, started the consulting company in 1946, the year Ed was born, and Ed started working with his father as a teenager. "I'm a licensed blaster. I have the federal permits and the state permits. I have the experience and I have passed tests, so I can operate as a blasting engineer or as a seismologist. On this project, it's a little of both.

"If there's a big show, a mistake has been made. This is not Hollywood. The site speaks for itself; it's the most sensitive site in the world, and with buildings all around it, you've got hundreds of thousands of people looking down on you every day. The culmination of this project is gonna make a statement to the whole world: that this is America. We rebuild. We don't accept defeat. And I think that's huge. I didn't solicit this work. I didn't even know it was gonna happen. I was immensely proud that I was asked to be here."

It may not be Hollywood, but it's still one hell of a show, running three times daily. The explosives come in cardboard tubes, looking for all the world like sticks of cartoon TNT, filled with an ammonium-nitrate pudding and tested to ensure they can withstand the force of a 30.06 shell fired from a distance of fifty feet without detonating. The blasting cap is in the pudding. A plastic fuse — a shock tube, Ed calls it, with an inner coating of lightweight explosive — runs up and out the hole to the detonator. The blasters, three guys in brown hard hats, shove the sticks and the shock tubes deep in the holes made by the line drills — a dozen or more holes patterned in a two-by-three- or three-by-three-foot grid within the outlines of a future Freedom Tower footing. Then they hook 'em up to the shock tubes — strands of bright yellow twisting through the pit — and pack the hole with grit and gravel.

Then the blasters stand clear, and the bucket-nosed excavator goes to work, eye-hooking huge mats made of recycled tires and steel mesh onto one of its metal teeth, one mat at a time, lifting and swinging until the mat's dangling above the blast grid, then bowing to let it whomp to the ground, until a rough mountain of rubber and steel covers the grid. Then the excavator huffs off and Carmine, the daytime super, shouts something about one whistle or two whistles; it's hard to make it out with all the noise and the soft little cantaloupe-orange plugs stuffed into your ears.

But you can sure as fuck hear the blaster's air horn blow — that's no whistle; that's God's own shofar — once, loud and long, then a second, briefer yowl, but now Carmine's shouting even louder, waving his thick arms at the Mr. John truck that has chosen this moment to come trundling down the long ramp into the pit, with two blue plastic outhouses strapped to its hind end.

"Ho! Yo! Ya gotta get farther," Carmine hollers to the driver, who backs up toward the ramp he just came down.

And then the air horn sounds again, twice, and you wait. And you wait. And when it finally comes, you feel the ground ripple under your feet a seeming millisecond before you hear the bass note and see the tons of rubber-and-steel matting and a small cirrus cloud of dust leap up over the grid. The matting flops back down, and the cloud lifts and scatters in the summer air. Three all-clear blasts from the air horn and it's over.

When Dan Doctoroff and the Port Authority and George Pataki and the media had all finished hoe-ramming Larry Silverstein and beating their chests, nothing was left to negotiate but the fine print. Larry never had returned fire publicly, although he did buy a series of weekly ads on the op-ed page of the Times, at ten grand per ad, assuring one and all that Silverstein Properties was not only ready, willing, and eager to get the rebuilding going, but also was financially able to see it through to the end. Privately — at the bargaining table — he made plain that he and his lease would sooner go to court than hand over any of the best building sites on ground zero.

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But if the Port Authority — with an endless money stream from every major bridge, tunnel, and airport in the metro area, plus the right to issue its own bonds — was so bent on getting into the real estate development business and so fearful that Larry was either dumb or dishonest enough to go bust on sixteen acres of the most valuable earth on the planet, then maybe the PA would like to take the Freedom Tower off his hands?

And that became the crux of the deal: Larry would build the Freedom Tower for the Port Authority on the PA's dime and collect a developer's fee of 1 percent — $20 million or so — for his trouble. The PA also would get the Deutsche Bank site, which it would be free to peddle to another developer to build housing. Larry would get his rent reduced, and he would keep the three best sites on ground zero.

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Publicly, the deal was presented as an ultimatum: Larry could take it or leave it — no more haggling, which was a good thing for both the PA and Pataki, or Larry might've wound up owning the George Washington Bridge and the governor's pants as well. Larry took the deal in late April, and he and the PA hammered out a six-page "Conceptual Framework" for rebuilding ground zero, with a timetable and everything, and they held yet another groundbreaking in the pit.

Just as in 2004, the governor proclaimed that "today we are going to build the Freedom Tower," only this time he said it in Spanish. The foundations crew rolled a couple of machines into the pit — the governor wanted a pair of excavators to parade down the ramp together, which would have looked more impressive, until the ramp collapsed — and no one mentioned that the utilities-relocation work had already been under way for a month or that the cornerstone Pataki had dedicated two years ago was still sitting a few yards away in a puddle of filthy water.

Larry was there, too, of course — he never misses a Freedom Tower groundbreaking — and he was beaming. Right next to Pataki. Shaking hands. Nothing personal.

"Listen," Larry says now, "after all the name-calling, we're still working together, right? So what does it mean? What does it accomplish? In private enterprise, does this ever surface? In private enterprise, you sit down together, you work things through, and you get it done.

"When you're dealing with government, they don't have the capacity to function the way we function in private enterprise, so they have to resort to name-calling and things of that sort. I knew it was coming, and it came. Fine. I'm not going anywhere. I'm gonna finish this job. I saw this not just as an obligation, but also a privilege, to rebuild. And I felt — and I feel it — as an obligation to my children, to my grandchildren, that this thing get rebuilt. Government, nongovernment — I'm gonna finish the job. We'll get it done."

The man is seventy-five years old now. He has two grown kids in the business, and when he signed the WTC lease in July of '01, his wife was hoping that she and Larry could take their yacht around the world for a year or two — and maybe that would've happened if 9/11 hadn't, but you doubt it. Easier to believe what other people in the business have said: Inside his head, Larry already knows whose leases elsewhere are expiring in 2010, 2011, 2012, and beyond. He's already making those deals in his mind, without any help from Dan Doctoroff's economic analysis.

About the ground-zero deal he has little to say. Three words: "I'm not complaining."

That's all — that, and a small grin. But his thin arms are spread wide, just like Brian's — It's really good — in the bottom of the pit.

,b>They're casting Freedom Tower steel in Luxembourg now. From Luxembourg, it ships to the port at Camden, New Jersey, where it will be loaded onto trucks and driven to Lynchburg, Virginia, to be customized into fifty-foot column lengths, then trucked back to New York to be assembled and erected in the pit by this year's end.

In Beamsville, Ontario, a shop foreman named Ray rips aluminum extrusions, fabricating 156 small anchors of his own devising to hang glass samples on the mock-up of two stories of the Freedom Tower's curtain wall — the building's outer shell — being built atop a cement platform behind a warehouse in Kearny, New Jersey.

And soon the mock-up's glass panels — each thirteen feet four inches high, the same as the real Freedom Tower's — will arrive from Italy and from Wisconsin at Ray's shop in Beamsville to be glazed before they make their way to Kearny.

And soon the architects of the Freedom Tower will ferry across the Hudson from their Wall Street offices, journeying to Kearny to see how their tower will actually look when the actual sun glitters off the actual glass.

And soon the foundations crew will plant the footings deep in the rock of the pit.

And soon — soon! — Larry and the Port Authority will hammer out and nail down new leases, and the PA will finally deliver its plans to build the infrastructure Larry needs to get his other towers going, or else, by September's end, the "Conceptual Framework," a six-page, seventeen-paragraph term paper encapsulating the most complex real estate deal in the annals of human history, will turn to dust, and it will forever be 9/12 at ground zero.

And soon — soon! it can't be soon enough — pigs will soar out of Mr. John's top-of-the-line crapper, fly straight to the UN building, and teach humankind to live in peace.

Meanwhile, they're building the Freedom Tower yet again in Hoboken. Not the pigs — a couple of guys named John and Adrian, at a shop called Radii, a miniature architectural world of its own behind an unmarked steel door that opens onto a wobbly fire escape barely affixed to the decrepit brick side of a sprawling factory that once housed the leather-goods maker whose name, Neumann, is still the only name on the place.

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"People who make it up the stairs really want to work with us," Ed Wood says. Ed's one of the owners of Radii, and his shop has turned out maybe twenty — Ed's lost count — iterations of the Freedom Tower. So far. Radii is where architects come and whisper adjectival descriptions to Ed and his partner, Leszek Stefanski, and their crew, many of whom are architects themselves.

"Prismatic," the Freedom Tower architects tell Radii. "Diffuse. Cascading. Glowing. Delicate yet strong. A waterfall of light." And they leave behind drawings that Radii scales down and uses to build its midget versions of a 1,776-foot tower.

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This go-round, John and Adrian are working on the redesigned Freedom Tower base and plaza, redoing a one-thirty-second-scale version of the building for a public presentation in less than two weeks. A year ago, nearly to the day, Radii was building the Freedom Tower for a prior unveiling, the first since the NYPD had sent the architects back to their drawing boards to move and bomb-proof the base to U.S. embassy standards. The result, a two-hundred-foot concrete cube of a pedestal, was to be clad in panels of nickel and steel. This year's model replaces those metal panels with three layers of thick-cast glass, an effect Radii is trying to capture with wee panels of acrylic, laser etched, scored, and layered to achieve a moire pattern.

"They design the building, and we design the model," Adrian says, working the edge of a tiny acrylic prism against a sanding block. "In theory, the light comes in, hits that" — the prism's sanded edge — "and gets thrown out the top." Grabbing a small halogen flashlight, he flicks it on; suddenly, the prism's slopes warm with light as a bright beam shoots from its smooth top.

"A matte surface — a sanded surface — will glow, and on a polished surface, the light will just carry on along," he says. "The edge of the plastic collects light, transmits it along the plastic, and then glows at the opposite edge. You get a lot of control over it that way. One of the problems we run into is, you can miniaturize a lot of stuff, but you can't miniaturize physics."

John's at the computer, taking the architects' model drawings down to scale, programming Radii's laser work on the base redesign. "It's gonna take some fine-tuning. We're still trying to figure what's the exact material — tinted or clear, what layers and what scoring, cutouts or no cutouts — and then we'll cut the real parts. By the end of today or tomorrow, we'll start putting it together."

Quick work compared with the real deal. Last year, Radii had three days' notice to build a three-foot-tall Freedom Tower model for Pataki — who seems to think he may be destined for a bigger job than governor of New York — to take with him on a trip to Iowa. Unlike physics, you apparently can miniaturize politics.

"A simplified version of it," John says."Very simple. We put it in a nice box with a handle."

John and Adrian's new model will debut in less than two weeks at an American Institute of Architects luncheon hosted by Larry Silverstein at 7 WTC — just off the north edge of the pit, a gleaming new fifty-two-story

office tower Larry began planning five weeks after 9/11 and now has finished in the same stretch of time that the PA and the state and city of New York have taken to decide how to begin to rebuild the World Trade Center.

And on the scorching late-June morning after the architects' luncheon, Larry will cool his heels in the shadow of 7 WTC, sitting at the bottom of the pit in the backseat of his Mercedes, the Wall Street Journal folded on the seat beside him, making phone calls — doing business — while he waits for the governor to stroll down the ramp to ground zero.

The governor has a gaggle of officials around him at the top of the ramp, trailed by a horde of media. He's here to proudly announce that the feds have agreed to move the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency into the Freedom Tower when it opens in 2011. This — Pataki wrangling state and federal tenants for the Freedom Tower — is part of the deal the Port Authority and Larry have made: Larry builds it, the Port Authority pays for it, and Pataki rustles up leases for at least one million of its 2.6 million square feet. And lately the PA, chaired by a New Jersey guy who's pressuring the governor for another tunnel across the Hudson, from lower Manhattan to what the Jersey guys like to call their Gold Coast, has been squawking publicly about how Pataki had better get humping on those leases or the Freedom Tower — and Pataki's legacy — just might get shrunk. Hence, today's press conference at the pit.

If it is delicious for Larry to see Pataki hustling office space — the man who, despite Larry's imprecations, chose to put the Freedom Tower on the most unbuildable and unleasable spot at ground zero; who, despite the NYPD's fears, named it Freedom Tower; who, despite what it takes to build a superskyscraper, told the world that its steel skeleton would be topped out by September 11, 2006 — if Larry enjoys the irony of this lame-duck governor-who-would-be-president reduced to scrounging up tenants like any real-life real estate developer, he's far too busy doing business to let on.

"Is he on his way yet?" Larry asks his assistant as he wraps up another call.

"He's about a third of the way down."

"A third of the way? I can make another three calls, for God's sake."

"Now he's halfway."

"Halfway? Gee. That's progress."

You can measure progress all kinds of ways at ground zero. Another length of conduit hung, another footing trough blasted out, another set of models of a building that doesn't yet exist, another photo op. For the men working in the pit, though — the guys in the plastic hats and safety vests, the bung-knuckled guys who show up down here every damn day — one big deal is just getting the fucking cornerstone out of the way.

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It takes a lot of elbowroom to build a lot of building — room for men, room for machines — and there's not a lot down here. The PA's got a contractor starting work on a new train station on the east side of the pit, and jostling for space is an everyday pain in the ass. The PA covered the old Twin Towers' footprints — Pataki officially declared them sacred in 2002 — but the north edge of the plywood cover itself overlaps the south edge of a Freedom Tower footing line, and no one knows yet what the hell will happen at that spot, since the Talmudists at the PA have declared the plywood untouchable, too, although in truth it's just a handy platform for stepping up out of the muck or out of the way, and it's used as such all day every day, and nobody says boo or, God knows, means any disrespect.

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Anyhow, the footprints take up an acre each, and the PA's train-station contractor is on a T&M contract — time and materials, not price — so he can just spread out and relax, because the PA, unlike an actual real estate developer who bids a job for a set amount, is more or less handing him a blank check, and the Freedom Tower guys need room to stage their work, and so it's time for the fucking cornerstone to hit the road.

Which turns into a real cloak-and-dagger operation. Poor Carmine has enough to do as daytime super, what with safety inspectors and the PA inspectors and the fire marshal and the NYPD and the Port Authority Police Department and the union guys and the train-station contractors, everyone and his uncle snaking up his ass every minute, and now he's gotta figure out how to finesse a twenty-ton chunk of granite up the ramp and out of the pit without drawing too much notice, embarrassing Pataki and alerting the locals — who even on a good day much prefer the taste of an Unhappy Meal — to the reality that five long years after 9/11, we're playing three-card monte with the stone.

So they do it early on a steamy late-June Friday morning, during the hour-or-so window between the utilities-relocation crew going home and the foundations crew coming in. And as for the PA and its train-station contractor bitching that yanking the stone is going to hold up their workday, screw 'em.

Carmine arranged to bring down a forty-five-ton crane a few days ago — smallish as these things go — and now a crew of nine or ten are down in the pit, including Louie, the driver of the flatbed, who will chauffeur the stone back to Long Island, where it was cut in 2004. It takes a good half hour to work the two thick yellow straps around the shoulders of the stone so that the crane can fish it out of the footing hole. They take the straps off the crane's hook to get it tight, and two men squat in the sludge on planks of rotted wood to make sure they're snug before the guy standing up by the cab twirls his hand to let the crane operator know it's time to lift.

It's a sad thing to see that stone come up. It looks like hell, stained pale gray below its waterline, splotched with what appears to be old black paint that ran down its back and dried. It's a sad thing to read the three-line inscription they etched upon it on Long Island in 2004:

TO HONOR AND REMEMBER THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, AND AS A TRIBUTE TO THE ENDURING SPIRIT OF FREEDOM.

Some fucking tribute is what you're thinking when one of the safety guys, Bobby, who always has a good word, walks up with his camera. "Every little new thing I do, I take a picture here," Bobby says. "Just to have for my grandchildren someday" — Bobby's maybe thirty-five, tops — "just to show 'em I'm buildin' the Freedom Tower."

As the crane begins its turn, four guys mount the flatbed to help wrestle down the dangling cornerstone.

"I'm a little bit of an amateur writer myself," Bobby says. "I'm putting together what's gonna be mostly photos I take — bear with me here — inside the shithouse, inside the plastic shithouses. So it's 'Port-a-Potty Poetry.' I wrote a whole intro, and I've been collecting pictures as I go to different job sites."

You laugh and tell Bobby the honest truth: This is a truly great idea.

Louie's got a brand-new blue tarp, still in the plastic, to cover the stone.

"Put the blankets down first," Carmine shouts. "Then the tarp."

So they cover the stone with a couple of old movers' blankets, then the tarp, and they cinch it down nice and tight, and Louie climbs up into the cab, takes 'er easy up the ramp — and just like that, Elvis has left the building. The rest of the crane crew piles into their pickups.

"See you all with the next one," one yells.

Carmine's grinning ear to ear as he walks over to them. "This was a home run," he says. "Thank you."

"Nice and quiet, right?"

"Home run. I appreciate it, guys. No problems. Thanks."

Over across the Jersey barriers to the east, the train-station crew is starting its workday.

In the haze at the bottom of the pit, it feels like noon already, but at least the cornerstone is out of the pit, out of the way, heading back home.

"It's a good thing," Carmine says as the foundation workers trickle in. "Y'know what I mean? It's everybody's stone." He sighs and walks over to the construction trailer. He's got a million phone calls to make and, apparently, an on-site truce to broker between the nighttime union electricians and the foundations contractor, who doesn't use electricians — and whose generators have been not-so-mysteriously unplugged in the middle of the night.

The line-drill crew's getting ready to punch fresh holes in the pit for today's blasting. Bobby comes over. "The day before yesterday, they did a big one," he says. "Blew the mats right off..."